I think some of you may have heard on more than one occasion about how that bloodthirsty tyrant Stalin set up a blockade of West Berlin in 1948 and how the freedom-loving nations organized the Berlin airlift to circumvent it. But today we’ll let you in on what really happened....Russia Insider
Who Really Put up the Berlin Wall?
Nicolai Starikov
2 comments:
The Berlin Wall was erected because people in East Germany were exploiting the situation. They lived in East Germany, where they enjoyed free health care, free housing, free education, and free food, but they worked in West Germany, where they enjoyed higher salaries and a wider variety of consumer goods to spend their money on. Every day they crossed the border back and forth.
The Soviet and East German governments regarded this as a “brain drain.” (Plus there were currency issues, as the article describes.) Finally in 1961 they constructed the Berlin wall to stop it.
In 1990 the wall was demolished. Today many Germans miss East Germany with its free housing, free medical care, etc. Their neoliberal paradise isn't all it's cracked up to be.
In hindsight the Berlin Wall should be seen for what it really became. A distractive factor that put human analytical thought into deep freeze. The distraction shifted focus away from the fact that free market capitalist General Equilibrium theory (better known as Invisible Hand theory)and Communist Command Economy theory are both flawed.
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